Unfortunately, you aren't given much guidance on the files that are safe to remove and those whose absence would be noticed. Taking a closer look at your file duplicatesĭigital Volcano's Duplicate Cleaner has many more rough edges than Auslogics' dupe IDer, but the program turns up more duplicate files - including DLLs and other system files. Note that I didn't test the content-search option, which promises to be slower. All the scans were completed in about a minute, and searches for specific categories of dupes were completed in seconds. On an 80GB Vista installation (on a 180GB partition) with the file-size limit disabled, Duplicate File Finder reported many more file multiples, but only 97MB of storage space would be recovered. When I used the default settings to search for duplicate files on a complete 50GB Windows 7 setup installed on an 80GB disk partition, fewer than 50MB of dupes were identified.

The program's default is set to ignore files smaller than 1MB. Auslogics' Duplicate File Finder lets you search for copies by name, date, size, and contents.

Other matching criteria include file name, date, size, and contents.

Unfortunately, you can't limit the search to specific file types. The program presents a sequence of dialogs for choosing the folders to scan for duplicates and the categories of files to include (such as images, video, audio, or everything). There's a lot to like about simple software - especially simple utilities such as Auslogics' Duplicate File Finder. Duplicate File Finder features a clear interface and speedy operation, while Duplicate Cleaner identifies more types of doubled-up files but is trickier to use, which means you're more likely to delete a file your system needs.įast and friendly way to spot file copies The two I tried - Duplicate File Finder from Auslogics and Digital Volcano's Duplicate Cleaner - take very different approaches to dupe removal. Several free utilities promise to hasten the file-cleanup process. If you rely on the file-management tools in Windows to root out unnecessary, space-clogging files, you're in for a long day of folder hopping. When my year-old laptop started running low on disk space, I knew one of the fastest ways to recover some lost hard-disk storage was to give the machine's duplicate files the boot. It doesn't take long for a computer to collect duplicate copies of all sorts of files.

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